Merckx index wrote:Woman Phillies fan (encountering John Kruk, smoking, in a restaurant): You shouldn’t be smoking cigarettes! You’re an athlete!

Kruk: I’m not an athlete, ma’am. I’m a ball player.

One of my favorite John Kruk moments was when he faced Randy Johnson during the All Star game. After Randy's first scorching pitch, Kruk was 'hanging ten' with his toes on the extreme outside of the batter's box ... scared shitless. Beautiful moment.

Pirates are in 1st place in the NL Central. I'm going with if not the biggest surprise of the season one of the biggest surprised of the season. As a Pirate fan I'm just going to enjoy the ride as I did not expect them to be this good to start the season.

If you love or don't know anything about baseball..the solution for that spectrum of fan and non-fan was the Little League World Series game between Australia vs Mexico...couldn't see a better game..couldn't see better sportsmanship..This is really baseball and what all good sport is about..Australia keeps getting better and better and better..

I'll start with the disclaimer that even though I was once a loyal baseball fan, I only watch games in October now. 18 innings of last night excepted, games are too slow. If you scroll though this thread I've probably already typed this, but after each pitch the batter has to tighten their gloves, adjust their cup, helmet, elbow guard, shin guard, clean their cleats, look at the coach... MLB wants to keep 9 inning games under three hours (maybe 2:55) when they should really be looking to get closer to 2:30 (like in the '70s and '80s). A pitch clock has been tossed around for a while and tried in the minors, but even though some relievers are painfully slow, there needs to be tighter batter timing too. There is a rule already in the books giving the pitcher 12 seconds once the batter is in the box, but if the batter already took 30 seconds, that's 42 seconds, best case, between pitches (most trickle out to 60 ish).

Excellent post JM. I watched last night's game for a while, which was a great game I thought. When it got into the 10th, I set my DVR to extend for a full hour (beyond the 30 minutes or so left), and went to bed, figuring at most the game would last 30 or so to get through a couple innings until someone scored. Nope. I said this was a great game, and it probably was, but it ended at 3:30am east coast time. I can only wonder how many people actually stayed up to watch it? If that game were in Boston, it would have been 34 degrees (and breezy) when it ended, which is more like football weather.

You probably heard some stats, that this game lasted longer than the entire world series back in something like 1920. This game, which likely few people saw, lasted over double the length of today's really long games. It will make a good stat in a stat based game, and great lore when talked about decades from now, but to stay up and watch it?

Recall a few years ago how MLB said that pitchers would be warned if taking too long, intentional walks were granted, and they reduced the amount of trips, and time players and managers can take to the mound? This was after Tony Larussa made several in that Cardinal World Series win over the Rangers. Well, that somehow increased the length of the game by four minutes. Every pitcher just threw a tad slower, everything, everyone moved a little slower, more deliberate.

Rob Manfred said MLB could institute a 20 second pitch clock in 2019 if games don't average under 3 hours. Well, with them getting longer, will this happen? I don't know how much it will matter, and how easy it will be to enforce, meaning you need a batter clock too. There's another problem, by the numbers pitch counts are longer, and at bats longer. And there's more relievers used than ever before, and that takes time.

Josh Peter wrote a good article in USA Today, saying it's time for MLB to Wake Up. Here's a quote

Even if all of America had been awake (to watch it), there would’ve been a serious problem for baseball.

As attention spans have shortened, the average duration of Major League Baseball game has lengthened — from 2 hours 27 minutes in 1972 to 3 hours 4 minutes in 2018. The marathon between the Dodgers and Red Sox only reinforced Major League Baseball’s albatross — long games, long season, long-overdue solutions unenacted.

I'm placing a lot of the blame on the batter so image if a team decided to push a hurry up offense (batter never steps out of the box) to force the pitchers to throw quicker. I can only assume that this would speed things up, and lead to more hits (and more hits will likely lead to more runs). Of course the catcher would do his best to drag some time too, but I would love to see a skipper try it.

Kimbrel couldn't do his karate kid pose because he would get balls called before he even stood up. I won't get started on all of the player gimmicks in MLB now.